Middbrief: German Theater Group wins competition

The Middlebury German Theater Group took home the top prize at the 33rd Annual German Theater Festival and Competition last Thursday, April 29, which was held at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. This is the sixth year in a row that the Middlebury group has participated in the competition and won first place.

The German Theater Festival and Competition is an annual all-day event in which elementary, middle, high school and university students present 15-minute theatrical productions in the German language and are judged by a board of German professors, consuls and representatives from the Boston Goethe-Institut, among others. Middlebury competed against teams from Mount Holyoke, the State University of New York at Oswego and Connecticut College this year — an unusually small number of competitors due to recession-induced budget cuts.

“The competition was very stiff this year,” said Associate Professor of German Bettina Matthias, the Middlebury group’s founder. “The cast … really came together as a group, even under pressure, and they were so much ‘in the play’ and in the moment, it really jumped across the theater’s pit and into the audience.”

Matthias founded the German Theater Group in early 2002, and since its inception the group has staged one or two full-length plays, in German, each academic year. In the past, the group has tackled such German dramatic masterpieces as Bertolt Brecht’s “The Three Penny Opera” and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Faust”; this semester, students have been hard at work on Arthur Schnitzler’s “Der grüne Kakadu,” which they excerpted and presented at the competition last week.

“The theater group is such a great way to combine our love for performing and performance with work in and on German,” said Matthias. “It is the single most enjoyable and rewarding thing in my professional life.”

“Acting with the German Theater Group is my way to shed the stress of tests and papers and become someone else on campus for a while,” said Hannah Hunter-Parker ’10, who has been involved in the group since her freshman year. “To see everyone’s language skills blossom as the production takes shape also is amazing.”

The group will stage the full-length version of “Der grüne Kakadu” for the public this Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Chateau.